WASHINGTON The Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal authorities may prosecute sick people who use marijuana under their doctors‘ supervision, a bitter defeat for advocates of the medical use of the drug.

The 6–to–3 decision, arising from a case in California, concluded that state laws cann >>>

LA PAZ President Carlos Mesa of Bolivia resigned for the second time in three months after he was forced to flee his office amid angry street protests outside the presidential palace that demanded the nationalization of the country‘s huge natural gas industry.

TAMPA, Florida A federal prosecutor charged that Sami Al–Arian, a fired Florida professor who was a well–known and outspoken advocate on Palestinian issues, lived a double life for more than a decade as the American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, "one of the most deadly terror organizations on ea >>>

TAIPEI Taiwan enacted major constitutional changes on Tuesday that will redraw the political landscape in favor of the two main parties and should assuage China‘s worries over the island‘s moving toward formal independence.

QOM, Iran Racks of colored robes, with neat stitches and fitting marks, fill the workshop of this scholarly city‘s most famous tailor, the Giorgio Armani of clerical clothes, Abolfazl Arabpour. The tailor, 76, a smiley man in a buttoned white linen robe and a beige skullcap, stretched out an exquisitely made cloa >>>

NEW DELHI The president of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party offered to resign from his post after Hindu hard–liners expressed outrage at his praise of Pakistan’s founder during a recent visit to Pakistan, party officials said Tuesday.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand When the chairman of China‘s National People‘s Congress, Wu Bangguo, visited New Zealand recently, a member of New Zealand‘s Parliament unfurled a Tibetan flag near where his cavalcade was due to pass – an act bound to offend Prime Minister Helen Clark‘s Chinese guest >>>

TAIPEI A convention adopted sweeping changes to Taiwan’s constitution Tuesday that favor the top two political parties and require that future amendments go directly before voters — a measure strongly opposed by China.

The 300–member National Assembly, chosen by popular ballot last month to address the c >>>

DETROIT The future of Visionary Vehicles, the upstart company that announced in January that it would bring the first Chinese–made automobiles to the United States by 2007, appears to be in some doubt.

Two top executives said in interviews on Monday that they had recently left Visionary, a privately held >>>

SAN FRANCISCO Steven Jobs took the stage at Apple Computer‘s Worldwide Developer Conference here to tell more than 3,000 of his most enthusiastic fans – and occasionally also his harshest critics – that he was giving them a new homework assignment÷ to rework their Macintosh programs to run on c >>>

Investors should sell resources stocks, including Rio Tinto Group, as global economic growth slows and on concern that demand from China may slow, according to Chris Pidcock, a strategist at Goldman Sachs JBWere in Melbourne.

"Miners have rallied on news flow about demand for commodities from China, but t >>>

BEIJING A leading Chinese oil producer, CNOOC, said on Tuesday that it was considering making a competing bid to Chevron‘s $16.4 billion offer for Unocal as soaring energy demand increases pressure on China to pursue oil supplies.

"The company announces that it is continuing to examine its options w >>>

BEIJING China will introduce measures to spur consumer spending to reduce a trade surplus that is fueling tensions with the United States and Europe, the country‘s central bank‘s governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, said Tuesday.

"We haven‘t seen much increase in consumption, but rather we saw rapi >>>

NEW YORK CitiFinancial, the consumer finance division of Citigroup, announced Monday that it had begun notifying about 3.' million U.S. customers that computer tapes containing information about their accounts had been lost.

Citigroup, which is based in New York, said the tapes were lost by United Parcel S >>>

HONG KONG China Shenhua Energy, which plans the world‘s biggest initial public offering this year, may be forced to sell its stock toward the bottom of the proposed range because coal prices have almost peaked, investors said Tuesday.

The company may price its shares around 7.85 Hong Kong dollars, or $1, >>>

The world‘s second–fastest growing economy after China is no longer India. It‘s Pakistan. According to figures released over the weekend by the Pakistani prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, his country‘s $110 billion economy is estimated to have grown 8.4 percent in the year ending on June 30.

BRUSSELS The European competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, has agreed to suspend a part of the historic antitrust ruling last year against Microsoft until after the company‘s appeal is concluded in the coming years, the commission said Monday.

BRUSSELS The European Union reduced Britain‘s contribution to its 2005 budget by €'0' million, adding to pressure on London to surrender its cherished annual rebate in negotiations under way on the next EU spending plan.

The British contribution was cut to €12.3 billion, or $15 billion, because o >>>

A senior executive of General Re, John Houldsworth, plans to plead guilty this week to federal criminal charges of helping the insurer American International Group alter its books, according to Houldsworth‘s lawyer and prosecutors investigating abuses in the insurance industry.

BEIJING Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, on Tuesday urged China to ease tight controls on its exchange rate for the sake of its own financial health, but China‘s top central banker said the country‘s fragile financial system needed more time to prepare.

NEW YORK John Houldsworth, an executive at Berkshire Hathaway‘s General Re unit, agreed to plead guilty to a federal criminal charge of helping American International Group distort its finances, a lawyer for the businessman said Monday.

JAKARTA Bank Central Asia and Bank Danamon, two of Indonesia‘s top five banks, have said that they would be willing to consider a merger as the central bank pushes the nation‘s 133 lenders to combine into fewer, larger institutions.

BANGALORE, India Intel, whose chips power 80 percent of the world‘s personal computers, says its role in helping consumers buy PCs for 4'' rupees, or $11.45, a month will help achieve annual sales growth in India of 30 percent a year.

SEOUL LG.Philips LCD, the world‘s biggest maker of liquid crystal displays, said Tuesday that it had won a contract to supply $5 billion worth of panels to Hewlett–Packard over the next three years, its largest ever transaction.

The order for notebook computer screens and LCD monitors, which starts >>>

Loopholes in U.S. pension laws allowed United Airlines to treat its pension fund as solid for years when in fact it was dangerously weakening, according to a new analysis by the agency that guarantees pensions.

That analysis was scheduled to be presented at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday. A seco >>>

MANILA Philippine inflation stayed near a six–year high for the fourth month in May, the government said Tuesday, increasing the chances that the central bank will raise its key overnight rate again this year.

The consumer price index rose 8.5 percent from a year earlier, the National Statistics Office. >>>

SINGAPORE Asian stocks fell on Tuesday for the first day in four, led by Samsung Electronics and Elpida Memory, after Merrill Lynch said investors should sell shares of chip makers including Micron Technology.

"Chip makers are still increasing capacity even though prices are falling and demand hasn‘ >>>

LONDON Like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière‘s "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," who was surprised to discover he had been speaking prose all his life, I have been taken aback to find that I have been living in the "Anglo–Saxon model."

OXFORD, England Forget the rock stars and the news media feeding–frenzy. When finance ministers of the Group of Eight industrial countries meet in London this weekend they will be dealing with matters of life and death, especially for the children of sub–Saharan Africa.

At a time when world leaders are struggling to keep dangerous nuclear materials from terrorists and rogue nations, a devious provision in the energy bill now in the U.S. Congress heads in the opposite direction. The provision would weaken controls on exporting bomb–grade uranium to plants abroad for use in making >>>

NAIROBI The rich world is searching for ways to help Africa. At the meeting of industrialized countries in July, there will be pronouncements about how to funnel money to Africans beset by poverty, disease and wars. There will be talk about modalities, measurements and criteria, and how to bypass corrupt officials and >>>

WASHINGTON When we think of major threats, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat is lurking, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

An outbreak could cause millions of deaths and threaten the security of government >>>

Next month could be a historic turning point for the more than 300 million Africans who live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain has been busily lining up international support for his proposal to attack poverty in Africa by ramping up foreign aid. Studies commissioned by >>>

Philip Bowring describes as "reasonable" the Bali court proceedings that sent Schapelle Corby to prison for 20 years for supposed marijuana smuggling ("Drug case brings out the worst in Australia," Views, June 2). But given the revelations of possible criminal infiltration of Australian airports, th >>>

LABADO, Sudan Last autumn, President George W. Bush declared the slaughter here in Darfur to be genocide, and then looked away. One reason for his paralysis is apparently the fear that Darfur may be another black hole of murder and mutilation, a hopeless quagmire to suck in well–meaning Americans

Facing up to U.S. abuse of prisoners MIAMI÷ U.S. officials were wrong to dismiss out of hand Amnesty International’s report that described the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as a "gulag." Let‘s be clear. The human–rights group badly overstated the situation when it compared U.S >>>

HONG KONG No one in this city has any illusions about enjoying a democratic system of government. Nonetheless, the current campaign for the "election" of a new chief executive is a curious spectacle, one that mixes a sense of unseriousness and good humor with some slightly disturbing echoes of Soviet–st >>>

BERLIN Does Europe have a soul? Would anybody die for Europe? Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany was asked those questions the other day by an American wondering whether the rejection of the European Union‘s constitution in France and the Netherlands last week did not mean that the EU itself lacked a kin >>>

PARIS The French daily Le Figaro compared the event to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was not referring to the French rejection of a European constitution. No, it was alluding to another rejection, that of the coveted three–star status in the Michelin guide by the French chef Alain Senderens.

WASHINGTON Flying into this city Monday, Cherie Blair also flew into a storm over the substantial fees she has accepted for public speaking and whether she is improperly exploiting her position as the wife of the British prime minister.

Blair was speaking Monday at the Kennedy Center in an event that the cultu >>>

LONDON In grim procession, some of Britain‘s best–known retailers from Boots to Marks & Spencer have lined up in recent times to report or warn of lower profits. But these days the gloom has an impact far beyond the dwindling profits from digital cameras at Jessops photographic stores or food at Sainsbu >>>

ROME Members of the anti–immigrant Northern League, a partner in Italy‘s governing coalition, stirred controversy over the weekend by calling for fines against women who wear burkas, the all–encompassing female Muslim dress, and advocating a crackdown on immigrant street vendors.

LONDON Deepening a sense of crisis and division in the European Union, Britain said Monday that it would suspend plans for a referendum on the new EU constitution that has already been rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands.

The announcement in Parliament by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, laid ba >>>

BERLIN Despite the overwhelming rejection by France and the Netherlands of the European Union‘s constitution and the undermining of the bloc‘s defense and security ambitions, the United States is firmly committed to a strong and united Europe, NATO‘s top civilian official said Monday in an interview.< >>>

Tens of thousands of Indians, miners, labor and peasant protesters staged their biggest anti–government march in weeks, paralyzing downtown La Paz on Monday as President Carlos Mesa struggled to defuse a severe political crisis amid suggestions he call early elections.

A resignation offer by President Carlos Mesa, whose 1'–month–old free–market government was unraveling, did little to halt a crippling blockade of La Paz Tuesday as tens of thousands of protesters marched on the capital for a second day.

President Bush touted his proposals for a hemisphere–wide free trade agreement, saying it will open the way to peace and prosperity for all nations of the Americas and reduce the attraction of "false ideologies." Speaking to an Organization of American States foreign ministers meeting, Bush also appeal >>>

Euro zone finance ministers have dismissed talk of a euro zone break–up amid the crisis over the EU constitution as "absurd." The euro suffered after French and Dutch voters rejected the EU charter last week because of fresh concern over the bloc‘s ability to push up its growth rates.

Pro–Syrian Shiite political parties swept parliamentary elections along Lebanon‘s southern border with Israel, a victory that poses a challenge to the growing opposition to Syria‘s longtime influence over Lebanon.

The militant group Hezbollah and its allies have won all 23 seats in south Leb >>>

Officials were evacuating residents of some nearby villages on Tuesday after western Mexico‘s Volcano of Fire erupted for the second time in two days, shooting burning rock high in the air and dusting the region with ash.

The eruption shortly after 11 p.m. Monday sent a column of ash about 5 kilometers >>>

A U.S. proposal to intervene in Western Hemisphere nations to push democracy rankled the leaders of several South American countries debating the issue Monday at the meeting of the Organization of American States.

"There needs to be a dialogue rather than an intervention," said Brazil‘s foreig >>>

A Chilean appeals court voted on Tuesday to strip ex–dictator Augusto Pinochet of immunity from prosecution so he can face tax fraud and other charges related to millions of dollars he held in secret bank accounts.

"In four out of five areas of investigation, the judges voted for removing immunity, >>>

South Africa‘s armed forces are battling HIV/AIDS, which affects almost a quarter of troops, with resources under strain as soldiers and officers fall to the epidemic, military officials said on Tuesday.

"At this stage we do rise to the occasion as an organization, but we are starting to get stretc >>>

"Wakhrou min houn" is a semi–rude way to tell someone to get lost in Arabic, but it‘s what Miriam Elias, a Turkmen Shiite married to a Sunni, said to four insurgents trying to launch an attack on an Iraqi army post from near her home in northeastern Tal Afar.

U.S. and Iraqi troops on Tuesday launched another major military operation against insurgents in Iraq, a show of force in the northwestern city of Tal Afar –– not far from the huge, porous Syria border that has been navigated with impunity by anti–American foreign fighters.

Venezuelan police seized a cargo of Colombian warplane missile components being transported to Israel and detained a warehouse manager employed by the German air freight company Lufthansa Cargo, officials said Tuesday.

"Some of these missile parts contained nitrogen which make their transport dangerous,& >>>

President Bush touted his proposals for a hemisphere–wide free trade agreement, saying it will open the way to peace and prosperity for all nations of the Americas and reduce the attraction of "false ideologies." Speaking to an Organization of American States foreign ministers meeting, Bush also appeal >>>